If you or any of your readers are interested, we do have a full featured 30-day trial and after that our solution is free for 2 VMs, forever! We’ve recently added support for VMware based workloads into our product and also include the usual things such as deduplication and encryption. We also have a number of other useful features such as:

– Granular Exchange Item level and File level restores
– Offsite backup with WAN Accelleration
– Schedulable sandbox verification features to make sure backups are restorable.

A full list of features can be found here: http://www.altaro.com/vm-backup/features.php

I also like to mention that we focus on SMBs and SMEs, provide very competitive pricing, and are licensed per host and not per socket or core, so load that host up with VMs! There aren’t any additional licensing costs from us until you put another host into place!

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! I’m always glad to help!

We have used it for a year, and decided just recently that we are looking for another solution. When it works it’s great, but it doesn’t work too often for our tastes, and we have a boilerplate VM hosting set up with minimal configuration variances.

I’m totally thrilled about Unitrends and thier appliances. Upgrades and all are so simple, no need to worry about the OS it is running on nor the SQL version.

Since I have been working with many other backup softwares, I actually find Veeam one of them more incomplete backup softwares on the market. I rather call it a DR software for virtual environment with the ability to do restore.

If I need a backup software I choose a software/solution that do this well, If I need a DR/HA software I choose a software/solution that do this well. I will definitely not choose a software/solution that is neither good or bad on both. So with that said, my choices are Unitrends for backup/recovery and for DR/HA my choice is Zerto.

So with this said I would not consider Veeam complete backup solution, in fact if you need to backup a single file you actually need to backup the complete VM (or at least not to my knowledge) I would say that this is really disturbing.

So the conlusion Vis that eeam is very costly both when it comes to licensing but also storage.

Speaking of promotions, I think they have one now, its valid until end of October 2013 and you could save up to 50%

Hi Nico,

I am glad you find Unitrends to your liking. They are good, being HW or SW appliance.
Now, let me explain, if you buy Unitrends now, you will pay for the product from the price list.
But, I remember two occasions when they had promotions (pricing):

1st was trade in promotion (if your existing backup solution was Symantec or 2 other vendors you were able to trade in your licences and got a hefty discount)

2nd was at the of the year (one or two years ago) when they offered 50% discount on your purchase.
I don’t remember if it was one or two years ago, sorry.
From my experiences they do max for the customer so I think it’s possible to get customer tailored pricing. All the friends that I recommended them to, said their sales team rock.

As for future promotions I have no clue, they say they grow like weed (i really hope that is the case – hint – smoke)
From all the vendors not only backup, I noticed that once they reach a point when they grow like a weed – they also change their core values, Veeam being example where pricing grows like weed. If VC demand to earn some money then I guess that is the case, was never on the other side.

That’s why I also can’t say if there will be future promotions, from unknown company they are now recognised around the world, they are opening offices in Europe and god knows where. But I hope they do come up with promotions at least one ore two.

“Unitrends (only good things about them, they have good promotions from time to time)”

I have evaluated Unitrends for some time and I’m also very familiar with Veeam. But I must say I would go with Unitrends before Veeam any time, I would even prefer their hardware appliances rather than their virtual appliances.

I believe that backup should be completely separated from production.

I’ve collected bug reports on the most critical issues of VBR7 in my blog.